Project Advisory Board Intranet

Welcome to the East India Company at Home case studies gallery

The following notes explain what you can expect to find in the project’s case studies, what we hope you will get out of them, and how you can contribute information to the project.

What you will find

When complete, the project website will provide open access to a series of short case studies of selected country houses, material objects and persons connected with the East India Company at Home’s key research questions. Each case study will contain text that describes and assesses a specific country house, object or person. Each will be illustrated with images that enrich those descriptions and assessments. Additionally, each will include a number of hyperlinks that connect the histories of any selected country house, object or person with other homes, material goods and people relevant to the project. The more research we complete on the project, the more links between different country houses, objects and persons you will be able to trace through the website. Moreover, we hope that by linking together research conducted by the project team and research undertaken by curators, family historians, local historians, librarians, students and others we will enrich the volume and quality of information available to address the central questions that drive The East India India Company at Home, 1757-1857.

What you will learn

The project is designed to situate English, Scottish and Welsh country houses simultaneously within local, national and global frameworks by focusing on the commercial, cultural, social and political impact of the East India Company. How did different counties, regions and countries within Britain engage with the Asian products from China, India and Japan imported by the Company? How did East India Company families and individuals—sailors, servants, merchants, civil servants, naval officers, wives and children—accommodate British and ‘Oriental’ tastes in fashioning and furnishing their homes? Why and how did family members send or bring Asian luxuries ‘home’ to Britain? What did these exotic objects mean to men and women of all social classes in Britain? What patterns can we discern in the exchange and display of such objects, and what do these patterns tell us about social relations and political hierarchies in Britain and its Indian empire? We hope that reading the case studies and following the links between them will help to answer many of these questions.

How you can contribute

Each of the case studies is accompanied by a list of key terms (persons, objects and country houses) about which we are eager to obtain additional information. This accompanying list indicates several specific kinds of information we are seeking. If you have information about any of the indicated items, you can email this information—including details of where verification of the information can be found—to East.India.Company@warwick.ac.uk . The project team will check through this information on a monthly basis. Information that is suitable for inclusion in the case studies will be added to the next edition of the case study in question that we place on the website, with your contribution noted under the ‘Authorship’ section at the end of the appropriate study. New editions of the case studies will be produced every 6 months, if we have new material to include. You will be notified in advance about the inclusion of your information in the new edition. You are also welcome to email the team about additional persons, objects or houses that could be linked to the case studies that are posted on the website. Where the project team acts on those suggestions, your contribution will be acknowledged in the next edition of the relevant case study.